How prone poor Humanity is to dam up the minutest remnants of its freedom, and build an artificial roof to prevent it looking up to the clear blue sky.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on humanity's tendency to limit its own freedoms and aspirations through self-imposed constraints.
E. T. A. Hoffmann's quote suggests that people often restrict their own freedoms by creating artificial barriers. These barriers prevent them from reaching for higher aspirations and understanding the broader world around them, symbolized by the 'clear blue sky.' It implies a critique of how society or individuals may confine themselves and miss the potential for greater freedom and enlightenment.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-limiting beliefs.
Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?
"But when you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women. 'And I don't quite know how they've managed to make this law in their favor, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well?
I say it in the writers' room all the time: My black is not your black. What's terrifying is that, just the same way we've all accepted that normal is white, everybody seems to buy into the idea that there's only one way to be black or one way to be Hispanic. That's as damaging as anything else.
Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror.
There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.
I don't believe what the papers are saying They're just out to capture my dime, Exaggerating this, exaggerating that.
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